Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 44: From Within

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

This remastered classic episode—complete with fresh narration and scoring—takes us back through the history of mysterious fires that seem to come from within. And be sure to stick around for the brand new bonus story at the end. Researched, written, and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with music by Chad Lawson, with additional help from GennaRose Nethercott and Harry Marks. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: BetterHelp: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE, and get on your way to being your best self. Squarespace: Build your own powerful, professional website, with free hosting, zero patches or upgrades, and 24/7 award-winning customer support. Start your free trial website today at Squarespace.com/lore, and when you make your first purchase, use offer code LORE to save 10%. Stamps: Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at Stamps.com/LORE. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here. ©2023 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

In 1987, in a small village in northwestern India, a young widow stood beside the funeral pyre that held the body of her husband. She was just 18, and he, 24. As the flames climbed higher and cremated his body, she stepped forward and threw herself onto him. Right there, in front of thousands who had gathered for the funeral, she was burned alive. And the people responded by building her a shrine. What she did, as horrible as it sounds to our modern sensibilities, was a tragic yet

common act in her culture. It's an ancient Hindu funeral rite, known as sati, and by practicing it, this young widow became one more participant in a very old tradition. Sati as a practice dates back at least 2,000 years. It wasn't an obscure practice, either. In the last 15 years, prior to its ban in 1829, it's estimated that over 8,000 women died as a result of sati. It's a problematic tradition, most likely carried on to rob a woman of her right to

inherit the property of her deceased husband. And although it's illegal today, it still occasionally happens in remote villages that have yet to leave the old ways behind. What an outsider sees, though, is a ritual that taps into a deep, ancient attraction we all seem to have toward fire. For a very long time, fire was a thing of power, a thing of mystery. The torches of our ancestors were used to frighten off predators and were then brought indoors to keep them warm on cold winter nights.

While humans might not have always understood it, we quickly learned that fire was a tool that we could use. Ever since, fire has been something we've played with and harnessed. Like sati, humans have worked it into countless religious and civic practices over the centuries. Maybe that's why we tend to think that we're the boss, that we, and not the flames, are in control. It's just a tool, after all. We are the masters.

But that's a dangerous assumption, because fire has one other inescapable, undeniable quality. Whether we want it to or not, fire burns. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Throughout the long, elaborate, complex history of humankind, there is a small handful of recurring themes. They're universal, crossing the borders of culture and chronology, and they never seem to go out of style.

Power, death, love, money. These are ever-present ideas that play out time and time again, like main characters in an epic novel. And with them, through it all, from the beginning of civilization up to the present, was fire. The ancient myths built stories to explain why we even had something as dangerous and helpful as fire. The Greek story of Prometheus tells of how he defied Zeus and stole fire from Mount Olympus, bringing it to humanity as a source of power and civilization.

And that idea, the notion of a deity or a supernatural hero who steals fire from the realm of the gods, is present in dozens of cultures around the world. Across the Atlantic and centuries later, the Cherokee would speak of Grandmother Spider than how she entered the land of light and brought fire back in a clay pot. Hebrew mythology tells of a fallen angel named Azazel, who brings knowledge of how to use fire and grants it to humanity. One of the Hindu sacred texts, known as the Rig Veda, carries the same theme, with fire locked away from humanity until a brave hero retrieves it.

In all of the stories, fire is a possession of the divine, and when humanity gets a hold of it, they grow and advance and change for the better. It's not difficult to see then how the idea of fire evolved over time to become a sort of symbol of the divine. Fire blesses us, in a sense. It makes life better. As a result, we've worked fire into every aspect of our lives. It's the cornerstone of technology, and has enabled us to evolve from cave paintings

to cell phones. Think about it. The earliest examples of writing were on clay tablets. If those clay tablets couldn't be fired, they would have fallen apart and vanished long ago. Fire in a literal sense made it possible to pass knowledge down to the next generation. Early on, we also discovered another place in our lives for fire, our funerals. Evidence of cremation dates back at least 20,000 years, and although it was never the

sole method of burial, it was vastly more common than it is today. The speed bump was Christianity. When belief in the resurrection of the body spread across Europe and the New World, a distaste for cremation came with it. In some places and times, it was even outlawed, carrying the death penalty. Cremation is a mixture of science and symbolism. In one sense, our bodies are just reduced to their basic elements, returning them to the Earth as part of a greater chemical cycle.

And in another sense, the afterlife, in the form of fire, consumes us. Either way you view it, at the core of the act, is that ever-present force. Fire. Cremation is a powerful process, too. Even at temperatures in excess of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, it still takes the average human body almost three hours to burn completely. When it's over, though, all that remains is just a few pounds of bone fragments, which are then crushed and moved into an urn.

True to much of human history, though, cremation is something we've managed to twist and bend to our own nature. As far back as 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians used death by burning as a punishment for certain crimes. That practice was echoed in ancient Egypt and carried on later in the Roman Empire. By the 13th century, many European kingdoms had begun to make burning a legally required method of execution for certain crimes. Wielded by Christian emperors, that punishment quickly became focused on people accused of

heresy, for straying from the accepted religious norms of the time. That's why, by the early 1500s, witchcraft and burning at the stake had become synonymous as chocolate and peanut butter. Just, you know, a lot less enjoyable. If there's anything to learn here, it's that humans have a long history of burning each other. We burn our dead, and sometimes we even burn the living. A key to both scenarios, though, is that we're in control and we know the reason why, whether

they're honorable or horrific. And in every case, fire has been a tool in our hands. There have been rare and unexpected moments in history, though. When that hasn't been the case, when someone has been consumed by fire, and despite all attempts to explain why, we're left with nothing but a mystery. And it's happened enough that we've even given it a name. Spontaneous human combustion. We didn't always have a name for it.

The term spontaneous human combustion first appeared in print in 1746, but there were stories told long before that that fit the description. One of the first, as far as I can tell, was written down in 1641 by Danish physician Thomas Bartolin. According to him, there was an Italian knight in the 15th century named Polonius Vorstius. The story goes that the knight was at home in Milan in 1470, eating and drinking with friends and family, and he apparently had a great love of strong wine, which he drank a lot of that night.

Bartolin describes how the knight, fully intoxicated and stinking of alcohol, belched fire, and probably surprised him as much as his parents, who were right there with him at the table. And then, without a source of ignition, he burst into flames and died before their eyes. More than a century later, a professor of philosophy named John Christopher Sturmius recorded a similar tale. In one of his books, he tells the story of three men who apparently liked to party. After encouraging each other to get absolutely blitzed on wine, two of the men died. Their cause of death was that they had been, and I quote, scorched and suffocated by a

flame forcing itself from the stomach. This idea that alcohol was to blame, and specifically the excessive ingestion of it, was one of the most common explanations tossed around in the early days of these tales. On one level, it was pretty logical. Alcohol is a flammable substance, so if someone was found mysteriously burned alive and they were a known alcoholic, well, the story sort of wrote itself. On the other hand, though, there was little science to support these claims. Most of the stories about these events speak of the wrath of God and how the sin of these

alcoholics brought judgment by fire. It was a convenient theory, but it didn't hold water, especially when you take the story of Contessa Cornelia di Bandi into consideration. Di Bandi was an Italian Countess in the city of Cisena, back in the early part of the 18th century. In an account from 1731, her story was recorded in detail. According to the tale, at the age of 62, the Countess ended her evening one night with a long conversation with her maid, and then retired to bed.

The following morning when the maid entered the Countess' bedroom, she discovered nothing more than two legs and a pile of ash. The legs, by the way, were still wearing stockings. And unlike other stories of spontaneous human combustion, this woman wasn't a heavy drinker. In fact, she was known to abstain from alcohol entirely. Most tales of events like this remain in the realm of speculation and whispered rumor, and rightly so. Every now and then, though, our superstitions sneak into more formal locations, like the

courtroom. That's what happened in 1725. Jean and Nicole Mille were in keepers in France, and they had quite the reputation. Nicole, as the story goes, was almost always drunk, and she was verbally abusive and difficult to work with, and maybe that's why Jean was rumored to be sleeping with one of the young servants there at their inn. They were an imperfect couple with a lot of issues to work through, apparently. In late February of 1725, a surgeon named Claude Nicolas Leca was passing through the

area and booked a room at the inn. According to his account, the following morning, a small pile of human remains was found in the inn's kitchen, about two feet from the hearth. It was Nicole, and all that remained of her were her unburned feet, her skull, and a few pieces of her spine. Almost immediately, her husband Jean was arrested and charged with the murder by fire of his wife. But he protested the charges.

He told the court that his wife had gone to bed with him around 8pm the previous night, but had left the bed a short while later. She told him that she couldn't sleep and exited the room. He assumed that she had gone off to drink somewhere by herself and just went back to sleep. Considering all the rumors about their unhappy marriage, the judge was slow to believe the innkeeper. It was too convenient, honestly, and they were ready to convict. And that's when the traveling surgeon, Leca, stepped in.

He spoke to the judge. He told him that there were many documented examples of unexplainable burnings like this, and that there were scientific logical causes behind them. As a medical expert, he supported the idea. Whatever the true cause of Nicole's death might have been, Leca told the court that her death seemed more like punishment from God for her heavy drinking and bitter attitude. And with no physical evidence to support the charge of murder, they should let her husband off the hook.

And it worked. Jean-Mierre was released, a free man thanks to a surgeon who was well-read and open-minded. Or thanks to a judge who was gullible. I will let you decide. That's a luxury that we have when we're talking about stories that are three centuries old after all. That distance, that age, it gives us a bit of freedom in our interpretation. When the story is just a few decades old, from the age of photography, forensic science,

and modern medicine, that's when it gets more tricky. Not because it's harder to believe, though. Quite the opposite. Sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming, so documented, and yet so bizarre that it takes on a life and a death of its own. Mary had two visitors on July 1st of 1951. Her son, Dr. Richard Reiser, had been to her apartment that evening and they'd been joined by Mary's landlady, Mrs. Pansy Carpenter.

Mary was 67 years old and she lived alone there in her apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida, so it was probably a friendly social call. Mary's guests left at about 9 p.m. that evening. She stayed in her recliner in the living room and they let themselves out. And that was that. Except for waking up at 5 in the morning to the smell of something burning, Mrs. Carpenter had a lovely night of sleep. There was a knock on the landlady's door at 8 that morning and she opened it to find

a telegraph boy standing there. Remember, this was the early 1950s, well before cell phones or even personal computers, so this was basically the mid-century equivalent of a text message, except this message was for Mary Reiser. The landlady signed for it and then walked up to Mary's room to deliver it personally. She knocked a few times and waited, but Mary was either asleep or already out. She figured that she would just set it on the kitchen table and remind her later so she grabbed the door knob and then pulled her hand away.

The metal knob was hot to the touch. Not only did it hurt, but it set off an alarm in her head. What if there was a fire? So she dashed back downstairs where two house painters were at work in another of the apartment units and asked for their help. They followed her up and quickly forced the door open. A wave of heat rolled out through the door and the apartment inside showed signs of fire. Well, sort of.

Basically it was just a corner of the living room, centered around the recliner that Mary loved to sit in, but the chair wasn't there anymore. All of the wood and fabric had burned away, leaving just a few springs in a blackened pile on the floor, and Mary had been in the chair when it had burned. We know this because when the police and firemen arrived, they found her unburned foot lying nearby. Other than the burn marks around the ankle, the foot and the fabric of the slipper it was inside were both unharmed.

They found a few other pieces of Mary in the pile of ash. Her liver was there, charred and fused to some vertebrae, and her skull was still intact, or at least nearly intact. You see, it had somehow shrunk. Some anecdotal reports say that it was the size of a teacup, but the official medical examiner's report just says that it was much smaller than it should have been. An FBI forensic team was called in. They took over and started to really examine the apartment.

As a result, things became even more confusing and mysterious, if that's even possible. They determined that Mary had been smoking and that she'd been sedated with a sleeping pill, something her son confirmed was part of her evening routine. But they also determined that in order for her body to incinerate so completely, a fire of at least 3,000 degrees would have had to burn for over three hours. And that's a lot of heat. So you'd expect the apartment to show signs of a fire like that. There were some, but it was mostly heat-related, and all of the visible damage was located

about four feet off the ground or higher. Above that invisible line, candles had melted into puddles of wax, a mirror had cracked from the heat, the plastic light switches had melted, and a greasy soot covered the walls. The grease, they said, was from Mary's body. She had weighed about 170 pounds at the time of her death, and the idea was that perhaps a cigarette ignited her clothing or bathrobe. Then her body would have burned like a candle wick, using her fat as a fuel source. Some scientists think it's possible, but it would have produced an intense amount of

heat, and that presented some problems for the investigators. Because yes, there was heat damage higher up the walls, and that greasy residue. The right beside the spot where the recliner had once stood, there was a pile of newspapers that remained untouched by the flames. The investigators were baffled. How could a human being burn so thoroughly that only a handful of bones remained and not ignite everything else in the apartment? Toward the end of the investigation, the police brought in a physical anthropologist named

Dr. Wilton Krogman. Due to his research, he had a wealth of experience with the physical elements of events like Mary Reeser's death. He would later write that he could not conceive of such complete cremation without more burning of the apartment. As for the skull, that too left Krogman utterly baffled. In a newspaper interview shortly after the investigation, he told a reporter, I have participated in the investigation of some 30 fire deaths in the past 20 years.

Never have I seen a human skull shrink by intense heat. In fact, the opposite has always been true. Dr. Krogman later said that the case still haunted him. Years later, it was the inexplicable nature of it all. The mystery, the clues and physics that just didn't seem to line up. He later wrote, The apartment and everything in it should have been consumed. I regard it as the most amazing thing I have ever seen. As I review it, the short hairs on my neck bristle with vague fear.

Were I living in the middle ages? I'd mutter something about black magic. There's a dance that we do with topics like spontaneous human combustion. We want to unravel the truth, to untie the knot and make sense of it all. It's very human of us, very logical and rational. I fully support that kind of behavior. On the other hand, though, we cling to mysteries like a beloved childhood toy. Don't kill the mood.

Don't shatter the dream. Just let me revel for a little bit longer inside this warm, cozy blankets of unexplainable conundrum. If that's you, I'm right there with you, trust me. We love knowing, and we hate knowing. Are these stories of knights and countesses and widows and drunks who have all burst into flames and been reduced to a handful of ash? Well they do something for us, don't they?

That's why authors like Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens all used spontaneous human combustion to kill off characters in their novels. Maybe science will one day point to the true source of these events. Maybe someone in a lab somewhere will be able to reproduce the circumstances and results and brush every last bit of mystery off the box we use to store these tales. Or maybe not, because sometimes we just never find the answers. These stories are full of the unexplainable, though, and that pushes us toward wonder. Whether we tell ourselves that some natural external source caused the fire, or that it

came from within, we're still left with too many questions. Why these people? Why was there so little damage outside the location of the body? Why weren't the houses or apartments burnt down around them? And like all of the unexplainable tales that tickle at the back of our minds, we know we'll never get all the answers. Thankfully though, the world sometimes tosses new stories our way, to remind us that these things still happen, and that's love it or hate it, we still don't know the answers.

In 2011 in Ireland, the fire department entered the home of an elderly man named Michael Flaherty. They were responding to a smoke alarm there, and when they entered, they found a small pile of human ash on the floor. Other than some heat damage close to the ash and above it on the ceiling, there were no other signs of a fire. The coroner listed the cause of death as spontaneous human combustion. Back in 1966, another elderly man, Dr. John Bentley from Pennsylvania, suffered a similar fate in his bathroom.

His cremated remains were found beside the toilet in his home. His walker had toppled into the fire, but the rubber grips were completely untouched. In 1986, Kendall Mott was worried about his retired father, George, who hadn't called him that day, so he went over to check on him. He arrived to find the doorknob hot to the touch, and the windows coated in dark soot, so he let himself in. George had died in bed while watching television, but there wasn't much left to examine. The pile of ash was contained to the mattress and nowhere else.

Forensic investigators determined that a fire of nearly 3,000 degrees had incinerated the man over the span of hours, which explains the ash, of course. But it doesn't explain the box of matches on the bedside table that were unburnt and perfectly intact, or the fact that George Mott wasn't a smoker. Yes, the TV melted, but the rest of the house was untouched by the fire that had to have taken place. As I said a moment ago, the only thing left of George Mott was a small pile of ash and a leg and a skull.

A skull that hadn't exploded or fallen apart, mind you, it had shrunk. Fire has always been, if you'll pardon the pun, a hot topic. From its role in ancient mythologies and global religions to its practical uses in our growth as humans, the significance of fire can't be understated, which is why stories of fire that come from mysterious places will always fascinate us, and because of that, we've tracked down one more amazing story to quench your burning curiosity. Check around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

When you're at your best, you can do great things, but sometimes life gets you bogged down and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you, because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. I know the benefits of therapy firsthand. There is something so powerful about having another person's guidance. And if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option.

As the world's largest therapy service, BetterHelp has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online. It's convenient, flexible, and affordable. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com slash lore today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash lore. This episode was also made possible by Squarespace.

It is a lot of work running more than one podcast. Grim and Mild, the company that I built to handle all of that, now has 8 full-time folks working there, which is crazy, and it makes all sorts of amazing content, and they deserve a showcase that's just as amazing as them. And for that, I turned to Squarespace. Why? Because Squarespace has everything that I needed to build the perfect websites. Go to grimandmild.com, 3 words, grimandmild.com, and check out what I was able to make for

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Build your new website today. Just visit squarespace.com slash lore to start your free trial website. And when you're ready to launch it, use the offer code LORE at checkout to save 10%. Squarespace, build something beautiful. And finally, this episode was made possible by Stamps. Stamps really flies, doesn't it? 2023 is already well underway. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business and set your year up for success.

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That's Stamps.com. Offer code LORE. Spontaneous human combustion is a neat party trick, but sadly one that can only be done once. Non-core performances a person might want to try their hand, or maybe their mind, at pyrokinesis. The term pyrokinesis was coined by none other than horror legend Stephen King in his book Fire Starter.

It described the young female protagonist's ability to create and control powerful destructive fires with her mind. But although King may have invented the word, he certainly didn't invent the concept. Pyrokinesis has been a staple of magicians, mediums, and mystics throughout history. For example, monks and other religious practitioners were known to walk over hot coals without burning their feet. Although with our modern eyes, it's easy to see that wetting the feet beforehand and moving quickly over the coals can reduce the chance of burns.

Scottish medium Daniel Dungless Home was known during the mid-1800s for levitating and communicating with the dead, but he would also do things like handle a heated coal straight from the fire without burning his hands. And in 2011, a Filipino toddler became a local celebrity for her ability to predict and create fires. According to reports, she once said the words, fire pillow, and moments later her pillow burst into flames. Other items around the house also started spontaneously igniting, and the parents were

so distraught they attempted to exercise whatever demon they believed was inside of her. To this day, no one knows how or why the fires started. However, before the three-year-old fire starter made the news, there was a W. Underwood of Paw Paw, Michigan. Underwood was a black man born in 1855 who was said to be able to manifest fires from a very young age. According to Underwood himself, he once held a perfumed handkerchief to his mouth, exhaled into it, and realized his breath made the handkerchief catch fire.

He was only 12 years old at the time. As you'd imagine, Underwood gained a nickname for his talents. People called him the blowtorch, and as he got older, his skills got more potent. He had to be incredibly careful of his breath, lest he blow too hard and set something ablaze. Underwood soon realized that he could breathe fire at will, like a human dragon, but only a few times a day. After one blast, he would collapse in his chair, fatigued and in need of a recharge. An examiner once placed his hand against the man's head after one such fiery expulsion

and found that his scalp twitched violently. But Underwood didn't suffer in vain. He put his talents to good use, earning friends and money by demonstrating those skills for people. One local resident recounted a time when Underwood accompanied him on a hunting party. The group needed to build a fire, but no one had brought any matches. Luckily, they didn't need any. Their guest picked up two handfuls of dry leaves, breathed on them for a while, and

then set them aflame all on his own. When Underwood performed, he charged $0.25 a show, the equivalent of about $7 today. It might not seem like much now, but he was a black man in rural Michigan and had managed to make his own money on his own terms and gained the respect and attention of others in his community. That was a big deal. Of course, wherever someone claimed to have extraordinary gifts, often skeptics waited in the wings to knock that person down a peg.

Dr. David Fisher, the school board clerk, didn't think Underwood was the real deal. So one night, he traveled to the man's home and forced him to prove himself. He made Underwood get out of bed and wash his hands and arms, then took a swab from inside his mouth. Finally, Fisher told Underwood to drink a glass of water before demanding a private performance. Fisher handed Underwood a sheet of newspaper that he'd brought along and had him breathe onto it.

Lo and behold, it ignited right before the school clerk's eyes. But proof was only part of the equation. People, including Underwood, wanted to know why he was able to light things on fire this way. That was the work that a doctor named Elsie Woodman did to study Underwood over the course of several months. Whether he had been hired to debunk the man's claims or hired by Underwood himself is unknown. But around 1822, Woodman published his findings in the Michigan Medical News and Scientific

American. They were as clear as day. Underwood was the real deal, and Woodman had no idea why. But even a medical paper published by a licensed physician wasn't enough to satiate the most jaded skeptics. One year after the report was published, a man named Dr. R. Thomas of Depeiro, Wisconsin came forward with his own theory on how Underwood was able to set objects on fire. He believed the enterprising young man had placed a small fragment of phosphorus in his

mouth, which he would push onto the item with his tongue. Then, with the phosphorus clamped within a piece of paper or handkerchief, he could rub it vigorously, causing it to ignite. How did Thomas come to deconstruct Underwood's alleged ruse? Because he had pulled the exact same prank himself when he was a boy. It was a plausible theory, but that's all it was, a theory. Underwood was never actually caught in the act of committing a fraud. Eventually, like a small flame in the palm of one's hand, the performer and pyrokinetic

seemingly fizzled out into obscurity. His name didn't appear in the history books, and the truth behind his talents was never fully explained. Could A.W. Underwood really breathe fire, or had he simply mastered slight of mouth? Anything is possible, but it is worth noting the parallels between Underwood and the celebrity mediums of his day, many of whom had been found out as hoaxes. Most always, they were people from low stations in life, with lofty dreams of a way out.

And through unexplainable powers, they rose above their stations like wild flames, becoming almost superhuman. In Underwood's case, that allowed him to live out his life in a blaze of glory. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional research from Jenna Rose Nethercott, and additional writing from Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television

show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. You can find more information on all of those things over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.